Jacob Atabet, by Michael Murphy
A puzzling novel about a man with mystical powers. Or not.
(Review posted 16 Oct 2004 18:01:16)

So on its face this is an interesting speculative novel about what it would be like to encounter someone with a certain amount of mystical power; the ability to contact spiritual realms of being, to heal wounds, to see more deeply than the rest of us into the inner nature of reality. The author, Michael Murphy, is one of the founders of the Esalen Institute, and presumably takes this sort of stuff kind of seriously.

But I found the book kind of puzzling. I mean, for all of the impressive language in which the narrator describes his encounters and interactions with Jacob Atabet:

Then I sat on a bench and watched him as he paced up and down. From a distance of a hundred yards or so he seemed smaller than usual, as if suspended in a pocket or indentation separate from the space around him. It was an impression I could not shake. Suddenly, I felt faint. When I told him, he said to get up and walk beside him to Telegraph Place. He said I was picking up something around him, something that Corinne and Kazi have felt since last Thursday.

... in fact, very little actually happens in the book. Atabet paints odd pictures and says strange things, the people that he hangs around with say strange things, the narrator has odd feelings, they go swimming in the ocean, and so on. The narrator mentions in passing that Atabet can cure diseases, and cured the daughter of a friend (of a friend of a friend?) of cancer, but this amazing ability is passed over very lightly; the narrator mentions once that Atabet made a rash on his (the narrator's) leg go away, but again it's in passing and might just as well have been a coincidence.

So, finishing this book and realizing how little had actually happened (it ends with lots of dazzling feelings and visions, but no events more remarkable than someone planning to open a new meditation center), it struck me that it could in fact be non-fiction. And if it was non-fiction it would be (at least to the cynical and tough-minded side of me) a very good example of how gullible people are in the presence of a strong personality, how easily tricked into feeling strange emotions and remembering impossible visions, if those emotions and visions fit into a picture of the world that they're fond of, and if that personality feeds illusions that they're already open to.

And so I find the book puzzling, because I doubt that that was what Murphy was aiming for, but that's certainly what he produced. And that puzzle probably makes the book more interesting than it would otherwise have been...